Tagged: yin and yang

The ‘left’ and the ‘right’ are being stalked and herded by masterful forces.

Frightened into choosing between a lesser-evil (false) dichotomy by those who govern on behalf of the hidden elite.

Alan Watts saw the answer to this societal manipulation – as he did for so many of our modern socio-political entrapments – rooted in the most ancient of iconographies.

It is by far one of Watts’ most subversive. Just take in the first sentence.

Obviously no society can tolerate within its own borders the existence of a way of liberation, a way of seeing through its institutions without feeling that such a way constitutes a threat to law and order.

I mean really take it in.

And then read the whole brilliant thing:

Obviously no society can tolerate within its own borders the existence of a way of liberation, a way of seeing through its institutions without feeling that such a way constitutes a threat to law and order.

Anybody who sees through the institutions of society and sees them for, as it were: created fictions in the same way as a novel or a work of art is a creative fiction.

Anybody who sees that, of course, could be regarded by the society is a potential menace.

In other words, you may put it in another way: one of the basic things which all social rules of convention conceal is what I would call the fundamental fellowship between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. As in the Chinese symbolism of the positive and the negative, the yang and the yin.

You know, you’ve seen that symbol of them together like two interlocked fishes.

Well, the great game – I mean the whole pretense of most societies – is that these two fishes are involved in a battle. As the ‘up’ fish and the ‘down’ fish, the ‘good’ fish and the ‘bad’ fish.

And they’re out for killing.

And the white fish, one of these days, is going to slay the black fish.

But when you see into it clearly, you realize that the white fish and the black fish go together. They’re twins, they’re really not fighting each other, they’re dancing with each other.

That, you see though, is a difficult thing to realize in a set of rules in which ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are the basic and formally opposed terms. When it is explicit in a set of rules that ‘yes’ and ‘no’, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, are the fundamental principles, it is implicit but not explicit that there is this fundamental bondage or fellowship between the two.

But the theory is, you see, that if people find that out,they won’t play the game anymore.

I mean supposing a certain social group finds out that its enemy group which is supposed to fight is really symbiotic to them. That is to say the enemy group fosters the survival of the group by pruning its population.

Would never do to admit that.

Would never never do to admit – just as George Orwell pointed out in his fantasy of the future 1984 – that a dictatorial government has to have an enemy. And if there isn’t one, it has to invent one. And by this means …by having something to fight, you see… having something to compete against… the energy of society, to go on doing its job…

Is stirred up.

And what the Buddha or bodhisattva type of person fundamentally is, is one who has seen through that, who doesn’t have to be stirred up by hatred and fear and competition to go on with the game of life.

Does that resonate?

If it does, would it be possible to stave off the shrieking voices all around demanding you to consider the stakesand the necessity to choose and do what’s right, to consider:

What voting and candidates and parties actually mean

When they are facilitated by the order itself.

And, maybe, even further:

If you authentically want to be part of changing this country and this world in a way that fundamentally transforms the machinations of social control and creates the opportunity to birth something entirely new and evolutionary…

Then, to question in a non-reactionary way: whether your place belongs within or without that superstructure.